Volume 4, Issue 1, Fall 2000

On Objectivity and Politics in Criticism
Edwin Black
Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin
e-black@email.msn.com

It is my thoughts that readers will be interested in? What a luxury! Does it mean that I don’t have to be "objective?" That I can write whatever I please, without restraint, without discipline, without discretion? Well, not quite. I still want to avoid appearing to be an ass. And so, out of concern for my reputation (subjective), I will try to present something that will make sense to an intelligent reader (objective). Which, in turn, suggests that the polarities of subjective and objective are not always antithetical. Sometimes they may be complementary.

I can certainly understand how the issue of objectivity in criticism arises. Scientific inquiries always seek to minimize the influence of the investigator by their methods of research and their requirement of replicability. This quest for objectivity has become, along with other attributes of scientific inquiry, an intellectual standard that some people apply indiscriminately. It’s a mistake. Objectivity is not universally desirable.

No one, to my knowledge, has represented criticism as scientific. At most (or least?), it has been characterized as "pre-scientific"--a condescending representation that assumes, quite gratuitously, that human mental activity is a pyramidal hierarchy with something called "science" hovering halolike above its apex and a grotesquely conceived "criticism" buried somewhere in its nether region. The conception itself is pre-scientific in the historic sense in which anything medieval can be called pre-scientific.

If we want to know about criticism, we look to people who have practiced it, who have engaged its problems and have somehow resolved some of them in tangible acts of criticism. And what accomplished critic has ever claimed that criticism should only be objective? Criticism is not supposed to be always objective. It is, of course, supposed to be always intelligent. More to the point, it is supposed to be always fair. Sometimes fairness requires objectivity and sometimes it doesn’t. Therefore, the relationship between objectivity and criticism is not constant; it is variable.

In my use of the term "criticism," I cannot extricate it from its origin in the Greek term "krisis," which translates into "judgment." The critic exercises judgment. In fact, in Greek the term for "judge" and the term for "critic" were the same term. Let’s play with that ambiguity a bit:

We do not demand that a judge in a courtroom be uniformly "objective." We demand that the judge be fair. If the judge’s being fair requires, at some phase of the judicial process, neutrality or detachment or distance--all, qualities associated with objectivity--then those are what we expect. On the other hand, if the judge’s being fair requires, at some other phase, empathy or compassion or introspection--all, qualities associated with subjectivity--then those are what we expect. What is important is that the judge be whatever is required for being fair. Exactly the same obtains with the critic.

Sometimes, at some stages of the critical process, it is important to be as objective as it is possible to be. There are critical problems that require for their solution a puritanical self-control--a disciplined indifference to one's own proclivities and one’s own local conditions. That is especially true of rhetorical criticism, which can be at its most valuable when it focuses on odious rhetors--bigots, demagogues, habitual liars--the understanding of whom may require critics to suspend their repugnance temporarily and, for a period, try to see the world with the cold neutrality of a sociopath. But such acts of objectivity are only intermittent, and never an end in themselves.

Of course, the analogy between the critic and the courtroom judge can be taken only so far. A critic’s being fair in criticism is not wholly the same as a judge’s being fair in a courtroom. Conventional procedures of law prescribe to a considerable extent the claims and counter-claims to which a judge is obliged to attend in order to be fair. Such a prescriptive order is not available to the critic. The critic’s procedures are, when at their best, original; they grow ad hoc from the critic’s engagement with the artifact. And because the critic has to generate not only a judgment of the artifact, but also the procedure by which the judgment was reached--because, in short, the critic’s responsibilities are legislative as well as judicial--the critic may have to be subjective more often than the judge in the court. That is because critics, unlike judges, cannot lay responsibility for their judgments on any code for which the critics themselves are not individually responsible.

The critic’s subjectivity is also the consequence of the critic’s having no powers of enforcement. The critic cannot compel our compliance with the critic’s judgment. The critic can only induce us, and therefore it is we, the readers of criticism, who demand the critic’s compliance with certain of our expectations. We expect the critic to see things for us that we are unlikely to see for ourselves until the critic has called them to our attention. That means that we expect the critic to tell us things that we do not already know. Because the critic’s perceptions are supposed to be valuable and uncommon (otherwise, why would we bother to read about them?), there is much in critical activity that ought to be subjective in the sense of being individual, novel, unconforming, sometimes even shocking.

So, far from encouraging critics to be objective all the time, I hold rather that a critic can be excessively objective. Indeed, excessive objectivity is a failure that occurs with unfortunate frequency in criticism.

Impersonal criticism is, by definition, objective. Objectivity, therefore, is manifested in more than just a passive facticity. Objectivity inheres in the substitution of any apriori method for the critic’s own perceptions and judgments. It follows, then, that the application in criticism of a political or ideological program that is not the critic’s own invention is an exercise in objectivity. And such exercises frequently display the deformities common to excessive objectivity in criticism, which are predictability and pedantry and wearisome uniformity. That is why excessively objective criticism--criticism that is without personality--is so repressive to write and so deadly to read.

Political judgments are certainly relevant to criticism, and political presuppositions are probably unavoidable in criticism. But politicized criticism--criticism that is in the service of an ideology--is another matter. The problem has been that so much of politicized criticism is heavy-handed and closed to discovery. The impetus of politicized criticism is to exploit its subject for the ratification of itself.

In 1844, Karl Marx said, "The essential sentiment of criticism is indignation; its essential activity is denunciation." Marx’s view is reflected in much of the dyspeptic criticism written by his acolytes, even those who are many levels removed from the Master: the echoes of echoes of echoes. A critical agenda that confines itself to indignant denunciation seems to me awfully constricted. Criticism has richer possibilities.

Good criticism is always a surprise. It is a surprise in the sense that you can’t anticipate what a good critic will have to say about a given artifact.

I don’t think that the expression of conventional opinions constitutes interesting criticism. By "conventional opinions" I mean to refer not just to the views of the Rotarian in Peoria; I mean to refer also to the pieties of any coterie whatever. The inventory of opinions that defines a political movement--no matter whether progressive or regressive, rational or psychotic, popular or insular--must become, at least to the adherents of that movement, conventional. It must in order to function as the ideological adhesion for a collective identity. Even anarchists have an orthodoxy.

Although it seems impossible for any of us to live a civic life without subscribing to some body of received doctrine, that doctrine, even if the critic conceives it vividly and believes it ardently, is not the stuff of enlightening criticism. Whatever its merits may be, it is derivative, and it intercedes between the critic and the object of criticism by effecting trite observations and stock responses in the critic.

T.S. Eliot wrote that "the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript sway in the wind, like a field of ripe corn." They’re not the only ones. We all have episodes of marching in the parade or dancing in the chorus. It is gratifying sometimes to move in synchrony with others. But we just shouldn’t try to be professional critics while we’re in the ripe corn mode.

It seems to me reasonable to demand of any writer: Surprise me. If the writer can’t deliver, the writer can be dismissed, no matter whether what is written is critical or political or fictional or anything else. Note that the demand is not, "please me;" nor is it, "comfort me." It is not a demand for conformity to any sort of bias in the reader. It is simply a demand that a writer have something to say. And repeating the pieties of an ideology is not having something to say. I think it was Truman Capote who once said of a fellow novelist’s work, "That isn’t writing; that’s typing." The same can be said of echoic ideologues.

So that these remarks are at least the semblance of an argument instead of being simple dogma, let me try to be clear about their premise. They are predicated on a proposition having to do with the relationship between criticism and its reader. The proposition is that although criticism is generically epideictic, since it engages in praise and blame, it is not functionally epideictic. That is, I am assuming that you do not read criticism solely in order to have your own opinions confirmed, but that you read criticism in order to be brought to see something that you hadn’t noticed on your own. If, on the other hand, it is personal confirmation that you want--if you want to be reassured and to have your intellectual passions licensed--you don’t then sit down and read criticism. You seek an epideictic occasion--some sort of rally or ceremony where co-believers can celebrate their articles of faith. Really good criticism is too singular to be confirmatory.

We don’t want to read criticism that tells us nothing that we didn’t already know. We don’t want to read criticism that reiterates yet again what we have heard before.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with a critic’s having political convictions. It is unavoidable. Only an idiot is without political convictions--in rare cases, maybe a holy idiot, but an idiot all the same. The very term, "idiot" is from the Greek word for "non-political person." We don’t want to read rhetorical criticism written by an idiot, which really means that we don’t want to read rhetorical criticism that has no political dimension to it. It may be possible to write apolitical but still luminous criticism of pure music or of nonrepresentational painting, but it is hard to imagine apolitical rhetorical criticism that isn’t desiccated. So, yes, rhetorical criticism is likely to have a political dimension and it ought to.

The inhibiting complication is that although the critic’s political convictions may merit respect, they are not necessarily going to be any more interesting or intelligent or original than the general run of political convictions. Just being a critic doesn’t qualify one to have anything to say about politics that has not already been said--and maybe better said--many times. So, I think that unless the critic has something fresh and knowledgeable to say, the critic should just shut up about politics. If the critic does that, then the political convictions of the critic will be presuppositional. That is, the critic will observe, judge and argue from some political convictions rather than to them. The critic’s politics will be implicit rather than explicit. Even so, the contours of the critic’s political convictions will be clear enough from the criticism.

In the end, there are no formulae, no prescriptions, for criticism. The methods of rhetorical criticism need to be objective to the extent that, in any given critique, they could be explicated and warranted. But it is important that critical techniques also be subjective to the extent that they are not mechanistic, not autonomous, not disengaged from the critics who use them. The best critics have so thoroughly assimilated their methods that those methods have become their characteristic modes of perception.

The only instrument of good criticism is the critic. It is not any external perspective or procedure or ideology, but only the convictions, values, and learning of the critic, only the observational and interpretive powers of the critic. That is why criticism, notwithstanding its obligation to be objective at crucial moments, is yet deeply subjective. The method of rhetorical criticism is the critic.

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